Okay, so I missed my post for yesterday. But Sunday morning is a lot like Saturday night, right?
Anyway, I have an excuse: I was playing with hugin. It's an automagic panorama creation tool—you drop in some pictures, feed it lens information, define control points in pairs of images that correspond to the same point in reality, optionally tweak some parameters I don't understand yet, and poof! Instant panorama. It does all the necessary warping of the images to remove perspective effects and minimize barrel distortion, while keeping the horizon level, then positions them correctly and does some edge blurring to remove harsh lines.
It's not perfect; the OS X port still has some roughness to the UI, and it doesn't (as I was hoping it would) automatically do color level adjustments of the pictures to match the colors at the control points in order to prevent sudden color variation across the final image. On the other hand, setting the control points is surprisingly painless, and it's pretty impressive to see how quickly it figures everything out. It's certainly unbelievably easy compared to doing everything myself in the Gimp, and does a lot more actual distorting rather than relying on meticulous airbrushing to fake it. And as an added bonus, there's actually a step where I have all the distorted and positioned images as separate files; it would be easy for me to inject some manual color adjustments at that point, or even to to my own custom fuzzing and stitching if there are any details I want to get just right.
All in all, I rate it extremely cool. Stay tuned for a sample panorama or two.
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